Basketball
The arena is home to the Plymouth Raiders professional basketball team, who compete in the elite British Basketball League. The Raiders have one of the biggest fan bases in British basketball, and games are often played in front of sell-out crowds of up to 1,480 people. The arena has been home to the Raiders since 1996, when the team moved in from the nearby Mayflower Centre looking for a bigger venue to play at.
The venue is one of the most unusual looking basketball arenas in the country, with one large two-tiered stand and a smaller temporary stand situated on the events stage. It is known for its off-court entertainment including laser light shows and pyrotechnics, but the actual playing court is deemed by many fans to be unsuitable for top level competition, despite hosting several England national team matches in 1997.
Read more about this topic: Plymouth Pavilions
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)